


Muddle Through (The First Five Weeks)

by predilection



Category: Power Rangers, Power Rangers Dino Charge
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning, Missing Scene, Prequel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-19
Updated: 2015-09-19
Packaged: 2018-04-21 13:21:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4830611
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/predilection/pseuds/predilection
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pre-series stories that explore Koda's revival and the early friendship between Koda, Kendall and Chase.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Muddle Through (The First Five Weeks)

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this fic because I wanted to explore what it was like for Koda, Kendall and Chase after Koda first woke up in our time. This fic was inspired by Koda's nightmare in episode 4 and the fact that the show glossed over the reality of Koda's obvious trauma.
> 
> I also wrote this fic to explain things the series neglected (or has neglected so far -- only ten episodes had aired at the time of writing), including: how exactly Koda was revived and the ramifications of his revival, why Koda can understand modern language in the broadest sense, why Chase and Koda call Kendall by her first name when everyone else calls her "Ms. Morgan", who introduced Koda to Bronto burgers, and how Koda, Chase and Kendall became friends. 
> 
> Warning: Much of this fic is about trauma and grief. If these topics make you uncomfortable, this may not be the fic for you. (Your self-care is important!) 
> 
> While parts of this story are quite heavy, this is also a story about people working through pain and sadness, about things slowly getting better, and about the comfort friends can offer each other.

**Week One: Revival**

They had spent weeks searching for the blue energem. Given Keeper's information, Kendall had expected it to be found near Stegosaurus fossils and not to be attached to, well...

"Is that a corpse?" Chase asked incredulously as she and Keeper carefully placed the frozen body of a man down on a worktable.

Kendall frowned down at the man. He was impossibly well preserved. His eyes were closed and his chin length hair was frozen to his cheeks. "It appears so."

"I would not be so quick to make assumptions," Keeper cautioned.

"Well," Chase said, walking over and making a disgusted face as he examined the man. "He looks like he's been dead for quite a while."

Given the cave they had found him in and the other remains they had found there, Kendall knew that he'd been frozen for more than a while. "Probably more like a hundred thousand years," she told Chase.

"Okay," Chase said. "Why is he here?"

As Kendall took out her medical scanner, she replied, "Look at his hand."

Chase leaned closer to the man. She could tell the moment Chase noticed what was held in a tight fist in one of the man's hands because his eyes went wide. "Is that an energem?" he asked.

"Yes," Keeper answered. "It is."

Chase reached up to wrap a hand around the energem around his own neck. "Did he bond with it?" he asked.

As if in answer to his question, Chase's energem started to glow. A moment later, the energem in the man's hand began to glow as well. Chase took a step back from the table as Kendall rushed towards it, the scanner in her hand.

The energem released multiple tendrils of blue light. They circled the man's body over and over again until he was encased in brightness. Kendall had to shield her eyes, and when the light subsided, the first thing she noticed was that the man on the table looked a lot less frozen.

She was so surprised that it took her a minute to realize that he was breathing -- his chest rising and falling steadily.

"What just happened?" Chase asked, and he sounded as shocked as she felt.

"I'm not sure," she admitted, running the scanner over the man. His vitals were coming back looking normal and very much not dead. "This shouldn't be possible."

"The energem is reviving him," Keeper explained.

"What?" Chase turned on his heel to face Keeper. "They can bring back the dead?"

"He was merely in stasis," Keeper explained, and that was news to Kendall. She thought back to when they discovered the body. She remembered the way Keeper insisted they bring the man back to the command center, and started to put the pieces together.

"The energem kept him alive," she said, looking to Keeper for confirmation. He nodded at her.

"Yes," Keeper told them. "An energem will lend its powers to those it bonds with."

Kendall knew it was what made people power rangers, but Keeper was suggesting that that was not the only power an energem granted the person it bonded to.

Kendall was pulled from her thoughts when she heard a groan. It was coming from the man, she realized. He opened his eyes sluggishly.

As impossible as it was, Kendall knew that this man was going to be the blue ranger.

"Hello," Kendall said, her voice unsteady with shock. "I'm--"

The man sat up abruptly, wide eyed and panicked. "Tagu!" he shouted as he tried to hoist himself off the worktable.

"Hold it," Chase said, reaching out and trying to push him back down into a sleeping position. "You probably shouldn't be moving around so soon after..."

The man looked at Chase, his eyebrows furrowing in confusion.

Then his energem started to glow again, and the man held it up curiously as tendrils of blue light began to encircle him once more.

"What's going on?" Kendall asked.

Keeper replied, "The energem is likely informing him that time has elapsed since he was last conscious. It may also be affecting his ability to understand us, acting a translator of sorts."

Suddenly the man cried out like he was in pain. "Tagu!" he shouted again, but it sounded almost like a question this time. His face contorted into an expression of anguish and he slumped against Chase's chest. He lowered his head, and his shoulders shook as he sucked in deep, shaky breaths.

Kendall was at a loss. She had no idea what to do. She had no idea how to even approach such pain.

"Are you alright, mate?" Chase asked the man, tugging him into a loose hug.

Kendall took off her glasses and put a hand over her eyes to hide the way she was starting to tear up. "Everyone he's ever known is long dead, Chase, and he just found out. He's in shock. He's grieving."

It was more than that, Kendall realized with a start. His way of life -- his culture, his language, his _everything_ \-- was gone.

Kendall wiped at her eyes and put her glasses back on.

Chase was staring down at the man, his hands hovering by the man's shoulders like he wanted to comfort him but didn't know how. 

After long minutes, the man raised his head to look up at Chase and said, "Dead. Tagu dead. All dead." That he could suddenly speak English all but proved Keeper's assertion that the energem acted as a makeshift translator. That these were his first words in English made her heart ache.

Chase finally put his hands down on the man's shoulders. "I'm sorry," he said.

The man lowered his head again, and he didn't stop crying for a very long time.

*

Kendall went over the man's vitals, came up with a few theories about how energems could influence human biology, and went and got everyone water.

She was doing everything she could to keep busy, even though her hands were shaking. She didn't know what else to do.

Keeper had vanished -- to where, she wasn't sure -- but Chase stayed with the man, not once leaving his side. He was talking to him in a low voice that Kendall couldn't quite make out from where she was. It sounded soothing.

Every so often the man would start crying again.

At some point, she looked up to see that the man and Chase were sitting side by side on the medical table, with their legs hanging off the edge. Chase had an arm slung around the man's shoulders and was rubbing small circles into his back.

Kendall couldn't help but wonder if the man understood the gesture -- if it was something he recognized as comfort. Did the energem translate body language too? Or were gestures like this universal?

She guessed that he did understand it because at some point he leaned into Chase and buried his face in Chase's collar as he wept. 

*

"What's your name?" Chase asked the man, hours later when Kendall brought them some more water.

The man hesitated.

"I'm Chase," Chase said, and then pointed at her. "And this is Ms. Morgan."

The man peered up at her through his hair. "Koda," he said. "My name. Koda."

"It's nice to meet you, Koda," Chase said. His lips flattened into a straight line. "Though I wish it could've been under better circumstances."

The man -- Koda -- closed his eyes, grief carved into every line of his expression. "Tagu," he whispered, tears streaming down his face.

After a few minutes, Chase asked gently, "Is Tagu a person?"

Koda nodded.

"Someone important to you?" Kendall asked, although she already knew the answer.

Koda nodded again. "My brother."

Chase sucked in a deep breath and pulled Koda closer. He lowered his head to Koda's hair, wrapped his arms around Koda's back and held Koda as his sobs shook his body.

 

*

 

**Week Two: Nightmares**

Kendall heard someone scream and almost dropped the scanner she was holding.

Koda was having a nightmare again.

She waited for Chase to intervene. Every time she heard Koda having a nightmare, Chase would go to him. 

She was thankful for Chase's assistance. She had never been good at giving comfort, and she was envious of the way Chase seemed to know what to do and what to say even when Koda was falling apart.

She hated to admit it, but she tended to avoid Koda. His pain was obviously deep and sometimes she felt like it would drown her if she got too close to it. And if Koda's pain bothered her so much, she couldn't even begin to imagine what he was experiencing. 

Koda cried out again, and she remembered that Chase had said he had an important errand to run and wouldn't be there tonight. It was up to her, then.

As she lifted herself out of her chair and slowly walked towards the cave Koda claimed as his own, it hit her for the first time that Chase had always been there to deal with situations like these, which meant that Chase had to have stayed at the command center _every_ night since Koda's revival two weeks ago. 

She swallowed, realizing that she owed it to both Chase and Koda to start pulling her weight.

She stood at the entrance of Koda's cave and watched him for a moment. He was lying on his back on his bed with a fur blanket half on top of him. He was twitching in his sleep, and this close, she could hear the little groans of pain he was letting out.

"Koda, you're having a nightmare," she said. He didn't wake, but he turned his head and the sound he let out made her want to cry. This time she yelled, "Koda! Wake up!"

He jolted awake, his muscles tensing as he sat up. He was suddenly breathing heavily, like he had just run a marathon. He ran a hand over his face and then looked up at her. "Nightmare?" he asked.

"Yeah," she said. She wanted to say something more -- something soothing -- but she wasn't Chase and she couldn't think of single a thing to say. Chase would at least crouch down by Koda and maybe put a comforting hand on his shoulder, but all she wanted to do was run.

She turned away, shame flooding through her as she retreated back to her workbench. She picked up a tablet to check on the results of tests she was running. She scrolled through the data mechanically, not really registering any of it.

Feeling overwhelmed, she sat down in her chair, dropped her tablet onto her lap and buried her face in her hands.

She didn't know what to do. She had no idea how to be better at this.

"Ms. Morgan?"

She lifted her head. Koda was standing in front of her. It said something about her mental state that he was able to get this close to her without her noticing.

"You okay?" he asked, sounding concerned. That was backwards, she thought. She was supposed to be the one worrying about him.

"I'm fine, Koda," she lied. 

He tilted his head as if he was examining her. 

"Can I. Uh. Stay here?"

She didn't really understand what he was asking, so she asked, "Here? In the command center?" 

"I don't want." He looked away and rubbed the back of his neck. "I don't want to be. In cave. Alone."

"Oh," she said, surprised. "Sure."

He nodded and then sat down on the cold floor, his back to a worktable, and closed his eyes.

Kendall took a deep breath and then another. Her hands closed tight around her tablet until her fingers were white. She felt like she was going to cry. She knew she had to do better than this.

She straightened her back, lifted her head, and walked over to where Koda was sitting. He opened his eyes and looked up at her as she approached.

"Come on," she said, proud of how steady her voice sounded. She offered him a hand up. "I can review these results in your room."

He smiled. It was just a little upward curve to his lips, barely a smile at all, but it was there. He took her hand and let her help him to his feet.

She felt anxious as she walked with him back to his room, but she also felt like the guilt and shame she had been carrying around for weeks was slowly being replaced by something that felt like courage.

She took a seat on a rock ledge that ran along one of his cave's walls as he lay back down on his bed.

She still didn't know what to say to Koda, but maybe she could do something instead of running away.

Maybe staying with him would be enough.

 

*

 

**Week Three: Social Life**

Chase walked out of Koda's room well after midnight, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. He had spent the evening with Koda, like he almost always did these days.

"You should go home," he told Kendall when he noticed that she was still working.

"I have too much to do," she told him. "And you should take your own advice. You have a shift tomorrow, if I'm not mistaken."

He huffed out a breath and she couldn't tell if he was amused or frustrated. What she could tell was that he looked exhausted. 

"You're here an awful lot," she pointed out. "If you want to go out with your friends or do something else for an evening, I can stay with Koda." She was proud of herself that she could offer such a thing now.

Chase shrugged. "I'm happy to do it." 

"What about your friends?" she asked. Before Koda had joined them, Chase never stayed late at the command center unless there were ranger duties for him to take care of. She knew he went to the skate park sometimes, and she assumed he had friends there.

"Most of my friends are back home." He smiled, but it seemed sad and didn't quite reach his eyes. He gestured at her and then back towards Koda's cave before adding, "In Amber Beach, my best friends are here."

She felt her breath leave her.

She didn't tend to think of Chase and Koda as her friends, but they were the people she spent the most time with, and outside of her family, they were the people she cared the most about. They were her friends too, she realized.

"Good night, Ms. Morgan," Chase said, turning to leave.

"Wait," she called after him and he looked back over his shoulder.

"You can call me 'Kendall'," she found herself saying. It was such a simple thing to suggest, but it felt like the right thing to do. She decided she would explain given names to Koda and offer him the same option later.

Chase smiled at her, and this time it reached his eyes. "Goodnight, Kendall," he said.

She felt herself smile back. "Goodnight, Chase."

 

*

 

**Week Four: Songs**

A month after he woke from the ice, Koda started to sing.

The first time Kendall heard him, she was half asleep. She thought the music she was hearing was part of a dream until she woke up fully. It was as she lifted herself up from her workbench and stretched that she realized that she was actually hearing singing, and that, from the sounds of it, it was Koda who was singing.

Kendall wandered towards the sound.

Koda was sitting in a cave Kendall intended to be eventually used for storage purposes, but was currently empty. It was a small cave and the acoustics were such that his song reverberated in an eerie, yet beautiful way. 

He sang what sounded like verse after verse of a rather complex song. Kendall thought about the way the media portrayed "cavemen" as monosyllabic and shook her head. Thanks to Koda, she knew that the dominant depictions of early humans couldn't have been more wrong in this regard as well as many others. Koda's mother tongue, she had discovered, was anything but simple.

Koda must've heard her approach because he stopped singing and turned towards her. "Sorry," he said. "I not know you there."

"I didn't know you sang," she told him.

He nodded. "I know many songs."

"What was the song you were just singing about?" she asked.

"Family," he said. "Also history. But history is family." He frowned, and Kendall assumed that it was because he was reminded of the loss of his family and of all of that history until Koda said, "I scared I forget." 

"Forget what?" she asked.

"Many things. But right now, I scared I forget songs. Back home, we all sing. We all remember. But here, only me. I want to remember all, but longer I am here, it getting harder."

"You can sing, if you want. I don't mind, especially if it'll help you remember," she told him, wishing she had more to offer him.

He was quiet for a moment as he seemed to contemplate her words and then he started to sing again.

*

Koda sang all the time after that, especially when he was exploring the caves. Every time Kendall heard him, he seemed to be singing a different song. Some of his songs sounded sad, but others sounded livelier. 

As time went on, she found herself thinking more and more about Koda's songs. They were something from his culture and his family that he still held in this time period. Of course he was scared of forgetting them. Especially since everyday he was bombarded with new information about a very different world.

It occurred to her at some point that his songs could easily be recorded.

She rummaged through her workbench until she found an audio recorder that doubled as an mp3 player. The device was about a decade old, but it worked well whenever she used it to record and replay verbal notes.

She called Koda over and showed it to him. "It can record sound," she explained, pointing to the side of the audio recorder. "If you hit this red button, this microphone records all the sounds it can pick up. If you hit this button, it will stop recording."

Koda raised a brow at her quizzically like he didn't quite understand, so she hit the red recording button and said, "Say something."

"Like what?" Koda asked.

"That'll work fine," she said, hitting the stop button. "This button plays what you record." She hit play and the audio recorder played back her own voice saying, "Say something," and Koda's voice asking, "Like what?"

"Device records," Koda said and his eyes went wide as he seemed to get how the audio recorder worked.

"I was thinking you could use it to record your songs, if you want," she said. "So you don't have to worry as much about forgetting them."

He stared at her, and for a moment she thought she miscalculated. Perhaps Koda wouldn't care for her suggestion. Perhaps, for some reason, he would be offended by it.

But he took the audio recorder from her hand. "Can I. Try?" he asked.

"Sure," she said, and then she sat quietly as Koda hit the recording button and began to sing. It was the song from the first time -- the song he said was about his family and history. 

She closed her eyes and listened. One day she would ask Koda if he would be willing to translate the lyrics for her, but today wasn't that day. Today was about giving Koda something she hoped would lighten the weight he carried.

When the song came to an end, she opened her eyes in time to see Koda hit the stop button. He put his finger over the play button, hesitating for a moment before pushing it.

His voice filled the room, this time coming from the audio recorder.

As Koda let the song play, he titled his head down towards the audio recorder, his hair obscuring his face from her view. When the song stopped, he raised his head and looked over at her. His cheeks were wet.

"Koda," she said. She opened her mouth to say something more, but no words came out. While she was getting better at facing his grief, words of comfort still weren't her forte. So she said nothing and sat with him as he held the audio recorder and wept.

"You can keep it," she told him after he stopped crying. "Please use it however you want."

He ducked his head, and said softly, "Thank you."

 

*

 

**Week Five: Bronto Burgers**

Kendall had learned that being frozen for millennia wreaked havoc with a person's digestive track.

Keeper had helped Kendall come up with a diet for Koda that gave his digestive system time to heal and fulfilled his nutritional needs.

It took weeks, but Koda's system was fully healed and could finally be introduced to new foods. She asked Chase to do the introducing. Chase had been the one to accompany Koda outside the command center, and he had been the one to take the time to explain the modern world to Koda. 

Besides, Kendall was a terrible eater and sometimes subsisted entirely on coffee and snack bars. She didn't want Koda to learn any of her bad habits. She figured anything Chase offered Koda would be better than her regular diet and she wondered what Chase would come up with.

So when Chase brought a take-out bag from the café down to the command center and gave it to Koda, she walked towards them, curious. "What did you bring?" she asked.

"I got you a burger," Chase said to Koda. He opened the bag and started to take out the contents, setting them down on the table in front of Koda. "These are fries, and this is a Bronto burger. Oh, and I got some ketchup too."

"Fries," Koda said, picking one up and examining it before popping it into his mouth. His face lit up a moment later, eyes going wide, like he was shocked by how it tasted.

"What do you think?" Chase asked him.

"Good," Koda said, and reached for another fry. 

"You should try some ketchup," Chase said, opening a packet and squeezing its contents over the fries.

Koda tried one of the fried covered in ketchup and said, "Ketchup good too."

As Kendall watched Koda devour the fries and get ketchup all over his hands, she said, "Huh. I've never seen you so excited about food before, Koda."

Chase snorted. "That's because the pre-made meals you and Keeper made for him were awful." 

"They were necessary," Kendall reminded him.

"That didn't make them any less awful. I made the mistake of trying a bit of one once. It was disgusting. Here, Koda. Try the burger."

Chase had to help Koda figure out how to hold the burger, but then Koda was biting into it. He made surprised noise and then took another bite. He ate the burger quickly and before she knew it, he was licking the leftover ketchup off his fingers.

"Burger very good!" Koda declared. Then he turned to her, and asked eagerly, "Kendall, can I eat more burger?"

Maybe it was because she was relieved that Koda looked so animated and sounded so excited. Maybe it was because of the ridiculousness of someone asking her for burgers when she was technically the manager of a burger joint and had access to an almost limitless supply of them. But regardless of the reason, Kendall laughed, the sound startling her. She hadn't laughed like that -- so suddenly and openly -- in a long time. "Yes, Koda," she told him. "You can have more burgers."

"Can I have burger now?" 

Now it was Chase who laughed. He patted Koda on the shoulder. "Come on. I'll take you up to the café."

"Café? At café, I can eat burger?"

"Absolutely," Chase replied. "You can order whatever you want. You can even get cookies for dessert." Chase threw out the garbage from Koda's meal, and then guided Koda towards the door to the museum. 

As Kendall watched them go, she felt strangely peaceful. This was a side to Koda she had never seen before. He wasn't exactly happy, but he seemed happier than she had ever seen him. He was genuinely enthusiastic about something from this time. 

And he had made her _laugh_. Had someone told her that that would happen even a week ago, she wouldn't have believed them.

Now that she thought about it, it wasn't just Koda who was changing. She was changing too. It was hard for her to remember that not so long ago she had kept her distance from Koda.

As for Chase, even he seemed to be in better spirits recently.

Slowly but surely things between the three of them were becoming easier. 

"Cookies? What cookies?" Koda asked Chase, pulling her from her thoughts.

"Delicious, that's what," Chase answered him. "There are a bunch of different kinds, and we can totally try them all."

Smiling to herself, she turned away from them and went back to her work.


End file.
